CHINA: Beijing teacher photographs more than a thousand signs around the city with misleading English words

Welcome to China, where you fill up your gas tank at an oil gate, get out from an export, and where police work in workstations. Confused? Amused? Beijing teacher Liu Yongli is simply embarrassed. He has spent the last three years photographing 1,000 or so examples of poor, misleading or just plain mysterious English used on signs in the Chinese capital and a few other cities. He has collected examples of signs that range from poor grammar or spelling -- "the begins of new life" and "Volu nteer" -- to the bizarre, "goods return" for example, which is supposed to mean refund. A favourite of his reads: "To take notice of safe, the slippery are very crafty". It is actually warning people to take care when using a sloping driveway up to a building. And another: "On the taxi the guest stands forward". Liu suggests the simpler "Taxi pick-up point" would probably do. One Beijing school even stuck up signs demanding students "Speaking English Only!" Others are like signs put out by the police warmly warning people "to receive strangers carefully" and "not to drive tiredly". Signs reading "Guest go no further" and "no entry on peacetime" are seen in several public places to replace "staff only" and "emergency exit". Liu first noticed how bad Beijing's Chinglish problem was in 2003 when studying for his masters degree. He got a camera a year later and started snapping away. Today, he says, he never leaves home without it. "English is widely studied in China, but it is remote from daily life. A lot of the common English, that is used in daily life, and on signs, does not appear in text books. Exams are full of multiple-choice questions, from which students cannot really learn real English," Liu said. Liu has attracted considerable local media attention for his campaign, and likes taking reporters to see a large car dealership where the word "exit" has been written "export" throughout, the two words being identical in Chinese. Other literal translations Liu has spotted are "oil gate" for a gas or petrol station and "business suspended" for closed. "Those signs are supposed to be helpful, because they show directions, give out instructions, or raise awareness of people. They are designed to make peoples' lives easier. But such mistakes in translation just make them not helpful at all, and even very confusing sometimes," Liu complained. Beijing has set up a body specifically to tackle the problem ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but Liu said the government does not pay enough attention to the problem, and a national standard is needed for people to follow. With China becoming more and more open, a lot of foreigners are coming to the country. Liu said people often put English on signs for image reasons, because they think English is fashionable. His job is to find out these sometimes embarrassing translations and correct them.

ITN Source | January 27, 2007

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